There is something stirring in pop music, and if you are very quiet, you might be able to hear it. Or even feel it. Rumbling with a physical power that can actually shake your insides, a new wave of DIY stars are borrowing the computer generated, bass-booming sounds coming out of the dubstep dance music scene and bending them to their own purposes, constructing a kind of future pop that is intimate, intense and soulful, directed at the heart and head rather than the feet.

From the Mercury-winning electro-indie of the xx to the polished soul of Jamie Woon, it is music that aspires to be as lyrically and emotionally sensitive as classic singer-songwriting while pressing forward into new sonic territory, where the spaces between and around the notes are as important as the notes themselves, filled with dubstep’s dramatic vibrations of subsonic bass and other auditory signatures of the modern dance floor. Loud is the new quiet.

Its poster boy might be James Blake, a tall (6ft 5in), handsome, introspective character who released his quite extraordinary self-titled debut album this month. A classically trained pianist and self-taught producer, he has emerged from Britain’s dubstep dance scene to conjure up his own unique sound.

Blake’s almost folky, introspective, piano-based songs are pulled apart, stretched in every direction, cut up and reassembled into surprising new shapes, where his disembodied vocals float over earth-shaking bass and vast chambers of echo, to ghost choirs of autotuned androids. It is gorgeous, strange and experimental yet accessible enough for the mainstream ear of daytime Radio One listeners, where Britain’s chatterbox DJs have been playing Blake’s minimalist cover of Feist’s Limit to Your Love alongside the usual flashy offerings from American rappers and R’n’B superbabes.

And that may be the most peculiar thing of all. If you had heard this warped and fractured music 10 years ago, it would have sounded as if it had arrived from another planet. But we have been led here by degrees, via the ambient dubstep of Burial, the autotuned folk of Bon Iver, the bold post-hip hop psychedelia of Kanye West, so that now it sounds like pop music.

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“It’s a physical track, with the sub at a frequency that rattles you,” says Blake, of his single. “I made it to be devastating in a club, on a huge sound system. You get a completely different experience if you listen to it on any other medium. But that’s great. If all the elements are in place, you should get 80 per cent of what a song has to offer no matter how you hear it, whether on headphones or on the radio.”

When I meet Blake, in a Brixton pub appropriately called The Rest is Noise, the woozy ambience of fellow post-dubstep travellers Mount Kimblie is playing quietly in the background, their space melodies mingling with the subsonic shudder of passing car engines.

“We live with incessant music, all the time,” he says. “Its like some weird musical purgatory, there is absolutely no rest for the ears, no space to absorb and reflect. It really surprises me that people in this day and age still write such busy music and fill up every space with layer upon layer of sound… it’s like musical landfill.”

The 23-year-old comes across as a thoughtful character. “Music without any intimacy drives me insane; it needs to appeal on the human level or you are left cold. Joni Mitchell and Simon and Garfunkel have an intensity that I love.”

He has played piano since the age of six, studied popular music at Goldsmith’s, and may have been set to become a conventional singer-songwriter before his discovery of dubstep set him on a new course.

“It really got inside my head. The bass is incredibly physical, the sub bass is extended so that your whole insides are shaking: it’s like being on a massage chair, and you feel it on another level to how you hear it. It unlocks another side of music. It’s like having a drummer play you, you become part of the musical process.”

Blake’s songs start life in traditional form, as a combination of lyric and melody performed at a piano, but he pulls them apart and reassembles them in search of something more profound, an intangible essence, something he “hasn’t heard before”. He explains that because he works on Apple’s Logic music software, “I’m looking

at bars, it’s quite easy to chop and build up. It’s not as abstract a process as it sounds.”

Technology has always shaped pop music and it is self-evident that such visually based recording programs have been moving us away from traditional band-style arrangements.

“At some stage in the process,” Blake says, “most mainstream pop records are being manipulated and possibly completely rebuilt on a computer, with a visual program.”

As guitars become invisible in the charts, there has been a recent spate of articles questioning whether rock is in terminal decline. But Blake is of the opinion that rock died years ago, certainly as a creative force. “When something stops being progressive, that’s when it ends.”

He rejects the idea that it has been replaced by what is euphemistically referred to as “urban music”, however. “Kids who make urban music don’t call it urban. I think it is just synths. It is music made in your bedroom. I don’t even think it’s a cultural or class divide; I think it is a technological divide.

“There used to be a musical elite, and it included the people that ran the studios and had the means to make music when nobody else could. But there’s no kid growing up in Brixton now thinking, 'I wish I could get into a studio.’ They just get Logic and they can start making music. DIY music has existed for a long time, but this is another incarnation. It was only a year between when I started producing music and when I had a record out. You hear a lot about how the music business is dying but I think I’m lucky to live in this age.”

It is hardly a revelation when Blake admits: “I’m happiest working on my own.” Modern recording technology actually favours the solitary producer, working for hours on end in his or her own bedroom studio. Talking about his friends in the xx (Blake does DJ sets with Jamie Smith, who has brought some of these new sonic aesthetics to an ambitious remix of hip-hop godfather Gil Scott Heron’s album I’m New Here, out next month on XL), Blake comments: “They are people who aren’t aggressive. I’m the same, we’re not that forward about things, we like to operate in our own domain.

“To make raw, beautiful music nowadays you don’t need anything more than a computer, and it’s accepted. I think that’s what’s changed. The means of music creation is not so important any more. People are adjusting their expectations of what pop music is, and what it can be.”